Mainline Protestants and Catholics

I think it’s important to note that by the start of the 20th century, Catholics made up the largest denomination in the United States. Although mainline Protestants do not agree on several main ideological points, they formed an alliance together so that they would not lose power in the United States.

Catholics seemed to have a more prominent role in social change than did the Protestants. Personally, I think this might have been because so many of the church’s supporters were in the working class. This class was in major need of social reforms during the early part of the 20th century, especially in concerns to the conditions for workers. While different Catholics had different ways of approaching things, nothing seemed to divide the church to the part where different sects had to be formed. Church leaders would occasionally speak out against certain individuals who they felt had crossed a line, but no major spilts occured within the church itself.

In contrast the Protestants seemed to have more structural concerns within themselves. Though they were able to ban together to form several groups, certain religions, such as the Methodists and Baptists, split into different organizations. This made it undoubtedly harder to be an effective voice in confronting social problems.

One major difference in the two groups is also their way of thinking. Dorothy O’Day started the Catholic Worker’s movement to directly feed and shelter the homeless. This is in direct contrast to the mainline Protestants, who seemed to believe that institutions like the government would be able to best provide aid. They heavily supported bureaucracy.

Today, the mainline Protestant churches still seem to have problems with their splits over ethical questions. The Catholic Church also seems spilt on ethical questions. Although the Pope is the main figure of the church, many Catholics do not necessarily hold the same views. Though I think this hinders both groups, I think both have been able to reach out to the homeless and less fortunate in a direct way (through soup kitchens and clothing drives, etc) that the government is not as able to do. Though I still take issues with the anti feminism in the Catholic Church, I believe more strives have been made in the last century for social reform and equality.

Historical Writings

Carla, Ed, and I were finally about to meet with the pastor this weekend. We also met with Bob C., who is heavily involved in both the church and the Washington neighborhood. Bob was able to provide us with information about the actual neighborhood, such as that the local development committee had been dissolved. Unfortunately, we had less time to discuss the church and its actual position in the community other than the fact that some local boys play basketball on the hoop in the church parking lot. We go back Tuesday, so we hope to have a better idea of our service options after that date.

One thing we did receive while visiting the church were pamphlets on its history. I haven’t gotten a chance to look at them yet, but they should aid us in compiling the church’s history. The church also has two filing cabinets full of documents that should also be a major help.
I’m aware that we may have an overload of information and will be unable to include it all, but I trust that we will be able to find a good topic to focus on for the church’s history.

Thinking about the history of the church got me interested in the history of my hometown. Currently a suburb of Chicago, it lays 25 miles from the city. It got it start when the train line decided to build a track through it.

Now here I’ve read differing accounts. Some people claim that wealthy Chicagoans who were tired of the city decided to settle there and it prospered from there. The more interesting account claims that the people who first settled it were actually tuberculosis patients and those with illnesses trying to get away from the polluted air of Chicago.

I can see why the town wouldn’t want it published that they were founded by a group of sick people. That would bring a much more negative image to the city than “a bunch of people wanting to get away from the hustle and the bustle of a dirty city.”

Though this information wouldn’t be easy to find, I can think of several ways I could acquire it. The first thing I could look at would be church records or town records from when the town was first founded. The best records to check would probably be the death records. (Morbid, but true.) The town also has a historical society, so I’m positive I could find records there. If I could find any firsthand accounts or diaries, this would be a large help, as well.

The town didn’t have a hospital until 1904, but I would assume there would be a doctor, so I could look for those records as well. In the 1940s, a formal sanatorium was built in the town limits. Though it has been torn down, the area it was in also contained records. Also, the foundation that built the sanatorium is still in existence, so I could ask them for help as well.

I think it will actually be very difficult to find out the truth concerning whether or not people came to the town because of illness. Because the town might have taken awhile to file records properly, it might be difficult to find the actual records. Also, if the doctor didn’t have records or something happened to them, this would greatly diminish my chances of being able to find the answer to my question. Also if the records have been damaged or were improperly documented, this also might impede my search. There’s also the chance that some of the people who lived and died in the town would have their death records elsewhere. If this is the case, I could try to find who lived in the town and where they were at the time of their death. This would take a lot of work, but I could try.

Because it is the history of a town that I would want to sound credible, my writing would be formal. I would most definitely need a large amount of sources and footnotes. This is not a large topic, so it would probably be just an article, not a large book. I would write the article for an audience who was completely unaware of any of the history of the town, because very few people actually know the origins of the town.

I don’t know anything about the church like I do the town in which I live, so I think starting by reading the documents we have access to will give us some kind of topic to focus on that will make our search much easier. Although, the history of a church is much more focused than the history of an entire town or city, so this will already be much easier than if we were doing the entire Washington neighborhood or Dubuque.

Hopefully, I'll be able to write an interesting and accurate history!

Redefining Terms: The First Visit to the Neighborhood

For our service learning course, each student is given a church in the Washington neighborhood of Dubuque, IA. Each church is currently having problems connecting with the neighborhood, so we have been given the task to both aid them in this endeavor and participate in the programs already in place at the church.

When we were given our service sites two weeks ago, I was placed at Immanuel Congregational United Church of Christ with Carla and Ed. We tried to contact Pastor Sue Strickler, the woman who is the church’s part time pastor. She did return our emails, but we found out that we would be unable to meet with her this week. We plan on meeting her next week so that we can learn about the church in general and also its position in the community. I was sad that we were unable to meet with her this week, but have high hopes for next week.

Because we were unable to meet at the church, Carla and I decided to walk to the church and the surrounding area. We were able to see quite a great deal. The church seemed to be a normal brick building. I couldn’t take much away from just starring at it, but it’s a different style from the architecture of most Catholic churches I’ve seen. My friend from France was visiting, and when I showed him the building, he was very upset about it. He said it wasn’t very pretty and that he thought churches should be pretty. He also said that they should be stone and not brick. Of course, he lives in the city that houses Notre Dame, so he’s not really allowed to judge other churches. While having pretty stone buildings is always a bonus, I’m not overly concerned that the outside of the church isn’t built in the Gothic style. I’m far more concerned about what happens inside the building.

My knowledge of Dubuque doesn’t expand much past Loras College and downtown Dubuque, so I had only the observations of the neighborhood from other people. The neighborhood itself was not exactly what I’d been expecting. I’d been informed that the families that live there are typically lower-income families. I’d also heard several people mention that it wasn’t the safest place in Dubuque, especially during the nighttime hours. I’d even heard several people refer to it (sometimes jokingly, sometimes completely serious) as “the ghetto of Dubuque.” My high school in Chicago was in the middle of the Projects (a term for low-income public housing units in Chicago that have mostly been taken down due to the high gang activity and violence they influenced), so I was expecting something more along the lines of that. Based on my high school experiences, I was expecting to see buildings that were crumbling, complete with boarded up windows that provoked a sense of hopelessness by merely looking at them. I’m not going to lie; I was worried when I was told I would have to actually walk through the neighborhood- something that would be unheard of in the Projects. I wasn’t even allowed to walk past the bus station by my school- it would have been too dangerous, even in broad daylight.

(One of the buildings my school was surrounded by… This one is actually in better shape than most of them. All the public housing by my school have been demolished since I graduated in 2006 and replaced with mixed income housing.)

Thankfully, this was not what I saw. Some buildings were not in the very best shape, but I was happy to see that many were in good condition. I was also glad to see that they were painted bright colors and gave the neighborhood a cheery vibe and that people were outside on their lawns enjoying the beautiful day just as Carla and I were. We even got a few waves. It was a bit dirtier in terms of trash than in some areas of Dubuque, but nothing that would render the area uninhabitable. The neighborhood also didn’t have the eerie, abandoned feeling so common in the Chicago public housing. It actually seemed quite full of life. I think it should prove to be a very interesting experience working with the neighborhood. I’m excited to learn more about it. I also think several people need to redefine the term “ghetto” based on what I have seen thus far.

For the course, we were also asked to read the first chapter of Marth C. Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity. It was an interesting piece on Socratic teachings in the collegiate system. It definitely brings a question to the true meaning of “liberal arts.” For me, liberal arts have always meant studying more than one subject. I think merely studying one subject can make people single-minded and unaware of the world around them. I think the purpose of this education is to make them aware of more issues and more ways to think about them. Real life doesn’t have just one subject in it. Just learning one subject is never going to prepare you for the real world.

Nussbaum has a similar view. She seems to agree very much with a Socratic way of thinking. She thinks that people should be taught how to think for themselves. Her definition seems to be that schools should design their programs to teach their students to think for themselves, and that questioning things is not a bad thing. She points out that some people critique that this kind of teaching will make students go completely against the traditions and morals of society. She refutes this idea by pointing out that if the society has the morals and traditions, then the students will come to this conclusion and there will be no reason to worry. If it doesn’t, the students can find an even better way to think of things.

This way of thinking, looking at a subject from different angles to get a clearer picture, prepares people for service. First, it provides them with a way to think about the situation from multiple perspectives. Looking at a situation from a purely scientific or purely social way can be a problem. Sometimes the best solution is a mix of the two. Also, it allows people to think for themselves. Service is rarely just something you can do mindlessly. Sometimes, the person works with other people in situations that don’t always have a clear moral ground. Bringing back my blog entry from last week, an example of this is when I worked with children who would say things I didn’t always know how to respond to. Even though they tried, no one could give me a script of what to say to them. I had to think on my feet. A liberal arts education better prepares the student for reacting to these situations. The student, because they’re better able to think for themselves, could also think of a better way to do something, thereby helping even more than they originally could have.

I think a liberal education really prepares people for the real world. Although some students aren’t initially aware of the benefits, the people I have talked to who have entered the working world are always very pleased with their liberal arts education. I’m proud to currently be receiving this type of education.

Story of Service Past and Hopes for the Future

I’ve been doing service work ever since I was seven years old. I use to hate it. My mom would make me and my sisters go to cook and serve food to the homeless with the help of nuns from the order Mother Theresa had started. I didn’t like being around people I didn’t know, so serving food to them was nowhere near my ideal situation. I used to fight my mom about going, but she would pour on the Catholic guilt, and I would end up going twice a month.

I don’t remember much for my childhood, but my most vivid memory comes from serving with the nuns. When I was eight, I accidentally stumbled upon one of them comforting a crying woman. The woman was sobbing because she had just lost everything. She kept repeating that over and over, “I’ve lost everything.” At the time, it terrified me about losing I had, but I like to think that time has given me a slightly wiser view of the situation. It did end up helping me appreciate what I had.

We moved from Memphis to Chicago when I was nine, and no longer had to help the nuns. That makes me sound like a terrible person who hates helping people, but at nine I would have much rather been hanging out with my friends. My twin sister and I would occasionally ask people to bring toiletry items for the local women’s shelter rather than presents for our birthdays, but other than that we didn’t do much service work until high school.

In high school, I went to a private school in (what was then) a not-so-great area of Chicago. Nearby was a mostly underprivileged, Hispanic neighborhood. I would go to be a tutor there once a week for the first three years of high school. I would end up having the same child every week, so I go to know them pretty well (it was a new child every year). Whenever I was sick and would miss a week, the kids would always be very upset with me and give me a lecture. I tried as hard as I could not to miss a single week. The hardest part was listening to the difficult things these children had to put up with (relatives in prison, uninvolved parents, monetary issues… my first student even got third degree burns from something a relative had done to her) and responding properly. We were told the best way was just to help them focus on their work and report anything truly terrible. Although responding calmly was usually difficult, it was one of the best and only ways I found effective in dealing with these issues.

I haven’t been able to get into service work as much in college, though my mother did find a branch of Mother Theresa’s nuns in Chicago, so I help her the weeks that I’m at home.

I do hope to be able to help in some way through this service project. I know that in order to do so, I’ll have to learn more about the community. Without knowing anything about the community, there’s no way I can even help plan something that will help the church reach out more. My first goal is to learn more about the community.

I also will have to learn about the church- teachings, past, and current activities. Though I know about the Catholic teachings and some non Christian religions, such as Hinduism, I’m not as familiar with Protestant religions. I look forward to learning more about the church’s teachings. Without this knowledge, I won’t be able to help the church either.

I hope to grow in communicating with other people. Though I have come a long way since the age of seven, I still am shy when I’m not in a familiar setting. I feel sometimes like I’m missing out on something by not communicating with more people. I think this experience will help me branch out more.

I know that within the next few months we won’t be completely turning the community around and cause everyone to join the church, but I would like to help start something that could become something much more. I know how something small can turn into something big.

I look forward to the coming months. From past experience, I know that you can’t really know what to expect during service work. It should be interesting to see what happens.